Cafetiere Brew Guide

How do you make the perfect cafetiere of coffee? Well, the instructions below will get you pretty close to a perfect cup and importantly, be able to replicate it time and time again.

Firstly, there a few tools that you will require, so go ahead and put together everything on the ‘tools’ list:

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Cafetiere of your choice

Freshly roasted, coarse ground coffee

Your favourite coffee mug

Measuring scales – kitchen scales will be perfect

Spoon

Stopwatch

Kettle

Filtered water / bottled water

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Once you have the items above, you’re ready to make the best cafetiere of coffee ever and this is how to achieve it:

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Fill your kettle with your filtered water and begin to heat

Work out how many millilitre’s your cafetiere is – an 8 cup is usually around 1000ml

Place your cafetiere onto your measuring scales and ‘tare’ the weight so that with the cafetiere on, the weight is zero

With the volume of your cafetiere understood, we need to firstly decide on your desired weight of coffee. We use a range of 60 – 75g per 1000ml depending on the coffee. As a rule of thumb, let’s start with 60g per 1000ml

With our weight of 60g per 1000ml decided, let’s do some maths! So for an 8 cup cafetiere we would need to measure in 60g of freshly ground coffee. For a 4 cup at 600ml we would need to do: 60 / 1000 * 600 = 36g. Using this equation we can work out exactly how much coffee to use each and every time you make your cafetiere.

Place your mathematically decided weight of coffee into the cafetiere and ‘tare’ the weight once more

The cafeteire and coffee will equal zero weight and this is to precisely measure the volume and weight of water

Pour water over the ground coffee until the bed is fully wet and stop (short of your full amount). We are attempting to create a bloom, where water pre-infuses the dry coffee. As soon as you pour – start your stop watch!

After 30 seconds, pour the remaining water into the cafetiere, covering all the coffee until your target weight has been achieved. In this case 1000ml for our 8 cup cafetiere

Stir three times

Once 4 minutes is reached, gently remove the floating grinds by scooping them out with your spoon. This will leave less mess later on

Attach the plunger and plunge. This would take about 10 – 20 seconds to achieve and shouldn’t feel too ‘stiff’. If it does, the coffee may have been ground slightly too fine

Poor some remaining water from the kettle into your mug and discard. This is solely to pre-heat the cup

Once the plunge has been completed, pour your coffee into your cup and enjoy!

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The fifteen steps above are meant as a guide. Please alter where necessary to fine tune against each coffee you try.

If you come across any other variations of how to make the perfect cafetiere, do feel free to email us!